Honours keep coming for athletes

Memories live on

Chris Young/The Canadian Press

From left, Shona Thorburn, Reid Coolsaet, Natalie Mastracci, Joseph Veloce and Diana Matheson pose for a photo as they display their Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medals during a ceremony in Toronto on Friday. Sports Minister Bal Gosal handed out medals to members of Canada's London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic team.

TORONTO True to its word, the Canadian Olympic Committee is keeping the torch ablaze.

Continuing its wall-to-wall promotion of Olympic athletes that stretches back to before the Vancouver Games, the COC presented several Canadian Olympians and Paralympians with Queen's Diamond Jubilee medals at the Royal Ontario Museum on Friday.

The medals, honouring Mum's 60 years on the bejewelled seat, are presented to athletes who have brought honour to the country. Most of Canada's 2012 Olympians had received the medals at various earlier functions but 25 were handed out Friday, including a handful to Hamilton-area athletes.

Organizers such as COC president Marcel Aubut and 2012 chef de mission Mark Tewksbury promised Canada's athletes would not fade from view after the Games, and that Winter and Summer Olympians and Paralympians, would feel like one big family.

And, according to the athletes themselves, that's happening.

“This morning, I asked my roommate, Taylor Milne, who was an '08 Olympian ‘Did you have any of these awards or parades, like we've had?' and he said that didn't happen four years ago,” said Hamilton marathoner Reid Coolsaet. “Because we hosted in 2010, people got behind the athletes a little more, and did a few things afterward and it's carried right on.”

Westdale grad Shona Thorburn says that, although she's missed some celebratory events because she's playing pro basketball in Aix-en-Provence, it's gratifying to see the high profile that post-Olympic athletes have been accorded.

And Oakville's Diana Matheson, whose goal against France gave the Canadian women's team a bronze medal and is clearly the most important score in the history of Canadian soccer, says the goal, the medal and the recognition for the players “has been surreal.”

“We were in kind of a cocoon over there,” Matheson said. “We had kind of a hint after the U.S. game (a controversial loss), but we didn't know how big it had got back here. But we soon found out.”

Matheson is enthused she and 15 other top Canadians will have their salaries paid by Soccer Canada in the new U.S.-based women's pro league, which starts next spring. The league, Soccer Canada and the women themselves are working out who will play where.

While neither Matheson nor any other top Canadian female soccer player knows whether she'll be playing in the 2015 Pan Am Games — they fall immediately after the Women's 2015 World Cup, which Canada is hosting and giving by far the higher priority — Thorburn is hoping her national organization makes the right moves. If they do, she'll be at the Pan Ams and, hopefully, the 2016 Rio Olympians.

Moments after her team's Olympics ended, Thorburn stated emphatically she wants to be convinced that Canada Basketball is committed to putting the best competitive team possible on the floor at Rio. A search is on for a new national coach after Allison McNeill, who first coached Thorburn when she was 14, retired following the London Games.

“And, to be honest, I'm excited to see what Canada Basketball has in mind,” she reiterated Friday. “I think our eighth-place finish at the Olympics is something we can build on in the next four years. I want to compete. I want to be around in four years and have the possibility of medalling.

“I would hope that Canada puts a team together for the Pan Am Games that will place well in the tournament. It's in Canada. Don't you want to have your best people? I think it has to be a huge stepping-stone. What I would like to see is a Pan Am team that will develop into the team that is going to be at Rio.”

Coolsaet, who has rarely talked Rio in public, says he was encouraged that among the top finishers in London were runners who were older than he'll be in 2016 and he's leaning toward competing until then. That, of course, would include the Pan Ams just down the road from his hometown.

He's just returned from a month in Asia that included some rare (for him) tourism opportunities but was highlighted by three runs: a strong seventh in a major half-marathon event in China last Sunday, a pacing role in the Fukuoka marathon in Japan two weeks earlier and a rapid 10 K leg (third-fastest of his group) at a world team marathon event in Japan 10 days before that helped Canada to a best-ever sixth-place finish.

In the Fukuoka marathon, where Jerome Drayton set Canada's oldest athletics record 37 years ago, Coolsaet was scheduled to run just 22 kilometres, pacing a few friends through the race's first half. But, at 22, he felt good and continued. At 30, he still felt good and “started entertaining thoughts of continuing and going for a Canadian record, I wasn't that far off the pace. But I hadn't been taking my drinks because I was only supposed to be going 22 kilometres and figured it would be ugly at the end.”

Nothing ugly about Friday, as Canada continues to remember men and women who, in other post-Olympics, would have already been allowed to fade from the public eye.